Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Pushing the
boundaries of traditional landscape painting, Charles François Daubigny (1817–78)
was a vital touchstone and mentor for the subsequent generation of avant-garde
artists now widely celebrated as the Impressionists. In the 1850s and 1860s,
Daubigny routinely painted outdoors to directly capture qualities of light and
atmosphere, launched a floating studio boat on French waterways that
fundamentally changed the way artists could frame their compositions, employed
radical painterly techniques and exhibited sketch-like works that critics
assailed as “mere impressions.”

Though an inspiration
to artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Vincent Van Gogh, Daubigny
is now relatively unknown. Until this year he has never been the subject of a
major international exhibition, and no exhibition has previously examined Daubigny’s
profound influence upon the Impressionists and in turn their influence on his
late style.

Co-organized by the
Taft Museum of Art, the Scottish National Gallery and the Van Gogh Museum, Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of
Landscape revises our understanding of the origins of Impressionism by
reconsidering Daubigny as a central figure in the development of 19th-century
French landscape painting, including Impressionism.

The groundbreaking exhibition
will be on view at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, the sole U.S.
venue, from Feb. 20 through May 29, 2016. It will travel to the Scottish
National Gallery in Edinburgh and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdaml ater in
2016 and in early 2017.

In addition to one of
the Taft’s Daubigny paintings, which prompted the exhibition, Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of
Landscape will also feature spectacular loans from numerous North American
and European museums—including the Art Institute of Chicago; Montreal Museum of
Fine Arts; National Gallery, London; Museum of Fine Arts, Bordeaux; Scottish
National Gallery, Edinburgh; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam—and private collections.

“Conceived at the
Taft, this very special exhibition reflects the museum’s strength in European
art and its strong relationshipswith a host of distinguished international
institutions,” said Taft Director and CEO Deborah Emont Scott.“ We are thrilled
to bring this stellar group of European works of art to our greater Cincinnati,
regional and national audiences.”

Of the 55 paintings
in the exhibition, approximately 40 masterpieces by Daubigny will showcase the
full range of the artist’s achievements over four decades, including both small
easel paintings created outdoors and grand-scale paintings completed in the
studio for exhibition.

The remainder of the
works on view will offer ascinating and often surprising comparisons with Impressionist
and Post-Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Vincent Van
Gogh, revealing Daubigny’s impact on and importance for two subsequent
generations of artists, the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionist Van Gogh.

“This exhibition stakes
a claim for Daubigny’s inadequately recognized achievements as a powerful
innovator and precursor to one of the most original art historical movements of
all time,” said Lynne Ambrosini, Director of Collections and Exhibitions and
Curator of European Artat the Taft Museum of Art. Ambrosini is the initiating curator
(and one of five curators) of the exhibition.

In the vanguard of
artists who privileged and embraced the immediacy of open-air painting, Daubigny
invented the studio boat and was the first to paint views surrounded by water
instead of from the riverbanks. This pioneering compositional technique of
stripping away conventional foregrounds to more directly observe nature and
capture the effects of light, as well as his radically unfinished painting
style and brighter palette, had a powerful influence on the young Impressionists.

Highlights of the
exhibition include Daubigny’s images of silvery light and reflections along the
Seine and Oise rivers, stormy atmospheric effects at the Normandy coast, dramatic
moonlit landscapes, views of lush fields and scenes of blossoming orchards in
the countryside outside Paris—the last another subject he invented. These
subjects were soon taken up by Monet and Pissarro, whose similarly themed works
will also be featured, for example

Pissarro’s The Banks of
the Oise near Pontoise (1873, Indianapolis Museum of Art),

which echoes
Daubigny’s compositions, and

Monet’s Autumn on the
Seine, Argenteuil, (1873, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia), which was
painted from Monet’s emulative studio boat.

Daubigny’s panoramic
views of the sunny grain-fields near Auvers were admired by Van Gogh, who
adopted Daubigny’s then famous double-wide canvas formats for his own pictures
of the plains near Auvers.

The final section of
the exhibition presents five masterpieces by Van Gogh that reveal his debt to
Daubigny, including

(Daubigny's Garden, painted three times by Vincent van Gogh, depicts the enclosed garden of Charles-François Daubigny, a painter whom Van Gogh admired throughout his life. Van Gogh started with a small study of a section of the garden. Then he worked on two double-square paintings of the full walled garden. The paintings were made in Auvers between May and July 1890, during the last few months of his life. All three paintings are titled Daubigny's Garden and are distinguished by the museums they reside in: Kunstmuseum Basel, Hiroshima Museum of Art and Van Gogh Museum.)

About the Artist

From relatively
humble beginnings in Paris, Daubigny rose over the course of a long and eventually
acclaimed and successful career to help redefine French landscape painting. As
a teenager he worked at the Louvre restoring paintings and subsequently began
studies with artists Pierre-Asthasie-Théodore Sentièsand Paul Delaroche.

Daubigny’s travel to
Italy and extensive working trips in France inspired his rural and river views
of his country, which were exhibited and recognized at the annual Salons along
with compositions by his peers, including Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet,
Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet.

Publication

A fully illustrated176-page catalogue presenting significant new research about early Impressionism,
Daubigny and Van Gogh by leading scholars in the field will accompany the exhibition.
Essayists include the Taft’s Lynne Ambrosini, with two essays on Daubigny’s
legacy andonthe market for his landscapes; Michael Clarke, Director of the
Scottish National Gallery, who explores Daubigny’s river scenes; Maite van
Dijk, Curator of Paintings, Van Gogh Museum (VGM), on Daubigny and
Impressionists in the 1860s; Frances Fowle, Senior Curator of French Art,
Scottish National Gallery, who considers Auvers-sur-Oise as a site of artistic
production; Nienke Bakker, Curator of Paintings, VGM, who examines Van Gogh’s
admiration of and responses to Daubigny; and René Boitelle, Senior Paintings
Conservator, VGM, on Daubigny’s late painting techniques. The catalogue will be
published by the National Galleries of Scotland and distributed by ACC
Distribution, USA and UK.

This groundbreaking exhibition, organized by the Denver Art
Museum (DAM), features more than 100 works created by Andrew Wyeth and
his son Jamie Wyeth in a variety of media including pen and ink,
graphite, charcoal, watercolor, dry brush, tempera, oil and mixed media.
Never before has an exhibition displayed Andrew Wyeth's and Jamie
Wyeth’s work on this scale and in the shared context of their
autobiographies, studio practices and imaginations. Whether you are new
to the work of Andrew and Jamie Wyeth or are familiar with it, this
exhibition will allow you to see their art converge and diverge over the
years as it explores the connection between two American artists who
shared artistic habits of mind while maintaining their own unique
artistic voices.

This groundbreaking publication takes a novel approach in exploring the Wyeths’ working methods and processes. Author Timothy J. Standring also provides the reader with a rare personal glimpse into the artists’ world by chronicling his visits to their studios in the Brandywine Valley and Midcoast Maine over the course of four years. With over 200 color illustrations showing works in a variety of media—including pen and ink, graphite, chalk, watercolor, dry brush, tempera, and oil—this handsome book situates each artist’s oeuvre in the context of their shared biographies, place, and artistic practices.

Wyeth. Andrew and Jamie in the studio

In conjunction with the Denver Art Museum, the Museo
Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting the first retrospective in Europe on
Andrew and Jamie Wyeth, leading figures of 20th-century American realism.

Visitors will have the opportunity to learn about the work of these two
father and son artists, their lives and creative abilities through more
than 60 works loaned from public institutions and private collections,
some of them never previously exhibited in public.

Curated by Timothy Standring, curator of painting and sculpture at the
Gates Foundation of the Denver Art Museum, the exhibition will also
reveal how the respective work of these two artists has on occasions
assumed parallel directions, with each enriching the other or generating
mutual challenges. The large number of loans generously offered from
the private collection of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth and that of Jamie Wyeth
has allowed the curator to devise a comprehensive exhibition that
includes major works by Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) and Jamie Wyeth (born
1946), from all the periods within their careers.

Explore the renaissance of etching from the late 1850s through the turn of the
century in Europe and the United States with the new Cincinnati Art Museum
exhibition The Etching Revival from
Daubigny to Twachtman, on view February 13–May 8, 2016.

Featuring
more than 100 monochromatic prints from dozens of artists, the exhibition also includes
a wood etching press from the early 1900s, along with plates and tools used to
create the etchings. Etching is one of the first original art movements in
America and it played an important role in developing the public’s aesthetic
appreciation of the graphic arts.

The Process

Etching
involves using a substance to bite into metal surfaces with acid in order to
create a design. Etching was attractive to painters because it allowed them to
capture the fleeting effects of nature rapidly with freedom and spontaneity. The
process coincided with artist’s desire to work directly from nature, to sketch en plein air to create landscapes and
seascapes.

Ties to Cincinnati

Cincinnatians
featured in the exhibition include early etching practitioners Mary Louise
McLaughlin, Henry Farny, Lewis Henry Meakin and John Twachtman. Working abroad
in the 1880s, Covington, Ky.-born Frank Duveneck and his students, known as the
"Duveneck Boys,” pursued etching in Venice with James McNeill Whistler. Some
of Duveneck’s gifts will also be featured in the exhibition.

The Cincinnati Etching Club, the second etching
club in America after the New York Etching Club, was founded in 1879 and
actually gifted a group of prints to the Art Museum in 1882. These etchings were
among the first pieces of art acquired by the Art Museum.

The Artists and History

The
American Etching Revival was inspired by the earlier French and British
mid-century etching revivals by Barbizon artists, such as Charles François
Daubigny, Camille Corot, and Jean-François Millet, who made preparatory
drawings for etchings out of doors to capture natural landscapes and
romanticized scenes of peasants at work at the time of the industrial
revolution.

The
etchings of Whistler and Sir Francis Seymour Haden influenced the next
generation of artists. In 1862, the Society
of Etchers organization in France inspired a new generation of independent
etchers including Edouard Manet, Charles Meryon, and Maxine Lalanne, and
Impressionists Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt. The success of this movement was
fostered in both Europe and America by publishers, artistic printers and
critics.

“It’s
fascinating to look at these etchings and to learn the history behind them,”
said Cincinnati Art Museum Curator of Prints Kristin Spangenberg. “They
showcase an emerging art form and also the very beginnings of the Cincinnati
Art Museum’s permanent collection.”

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

On December 21, 1908, Max Weber, a twenty-seven-year-old Russian-born naturalized American, left Paris to return to New York where he would profoundly affect the course of American art as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, poet, essayist, and teacher. Henri “le Douanier” Rousseau, the visionary genius of French modernism, accompanied him to the Gare St. Lazare and called out to his departing friend, “N’oubliez pas la nature, Weber.” As Rousseau advised, Weber did not forget nature, and the natural world informed his work throughout his impressive sixty-year career. Best known today for his monumental cubist and futurist images of Manhattan from the 1910s, Weber redefined traditional subjects of figures, still life, and landscape to reflect his twentieth-century sensibility and touched on virtually every phase of modernism prior to his death in 1961.

The Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, presents an innovative exhibition that uses a digital twist to highlight Connecticut’s role in shaping the history of American landscape painting over the past two centuries. The Artist in the Connecticut Landscape borrows the notion of the online keyword searches and organizes the 76 artworks into categories that cut across traditional chronology to illuminate the complex ways in which we find meaning in the Connecticut landscape.

The Artist in the Connecticut Landscape marks the completion of an expansive project, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, to contribute over 400 digital images of fine art to a decade-old collaborative digital library of over 15,000 drawings, prints, maps, and photographs depicting historic images of Connecticut. Re-launched in 2015 as Connecticut History Illustrated (connecticuthistoryillustrated.org), the virtual library offers a platform for searching across media and institutions to discover cultural treasures.

This exhibition draws from the collections of ten partner institutions to present some of the most renowned depictions of Connecticut in art from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The works are from the collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, the Connecticut State Library, the Florence Griswold Museum, the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, the Mattatuck Museum, the Mystic Arts Center, Mystic Seaport, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Slater Memorial Museum, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.

By drawing on fine art collections from around the state, the exhibition reveals the surprising diversity of Connecticut’s landscape and the art that records it. Paintings of Connecticut’s terrain reflect a balance between rural scenery and urban vitality characteristic of a state whose small borders encompass a range of environments, from secluded woods, to clapboard barns, to towering smoke stacks, to panoramic shores.

Inspired by the digital library, The Artist in the Connecticut Landscape divides the paintings into eleven thematic categories that match keyword searches people might apply to the Connecticut landscape. The categories vary from colonial and countryside to factories and forest. As part of the exhibition planning, audience input on how various works of art should be categorized within the exhibition was sought through the Florence Griswold Museum’s social network.

is thought to be the earliest painting of the Connecticut landscape in North America. Haddam is part of the “Colonial” section of the exhibition and adapts the conventions of leisurely British sporting scenes to the landscape surrounding the artist’s home on the banks of the Connecticut River. Also in this section are early-twentieth-century landscape paintings from some of the state’s art colonies, an example of the way that a keyword like “colonial” can bring materials together in surprising ways.

Categories or keyword searches such as “Roads,” “Factories,” or “Towns” bring up depictions of Connecticut’s towns and cities reflecting the growth of population and the hustle and bustle of commerce and manufacturing along streets and waterfronts.

shows the 1823 truss bridge designed and patented by the New Haven architect Ithiel Town. The bridge had a 114-foot span crossing the Mill River between Hamden and Cheshire, Conn., in an area then called Whitneyville. Durrie included narrative elements in this landscape, showing the architect comparing the bridge to a sketch in his hands.

is placed in the “Forest” category and explores how artists at the turn of the twentieth century hoped to immerse themselves in the beauties of nature as an antidote to urban life.

The Artist in the Connecticut Landscape offers audiences a chance to appreciate the breadth of scenery found in every corner of the state. The landscapes represented in the exhibition are treated as windows into the time and place of their creation, unlocking for contemporary visitors the shifting uses and meanings of Connecticut’s landscape over two hundred and fifty years. Combined with the photographs, maps, and other documents available on Connecticut History Illustrated, which visitors can peruse on a gallery kiosk or later at home, audiences will be able to consider their own perspectives on Connecticut’s landscape.

Founded in 1936, the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme is a center for American art accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. In the early years of the twentieth century, the Museum’s site and grounds served as the center for the Lyme Art Colony, one of America’s most famous art colonies. The recipient of a Trip Advisor 2014 Certificate of Excellence, the Florence Griswold Museum has been called a “Giverny in Connecticut” by the Wall Street Journal, and a “must-see” by the Boston Globe. With an eye toward the integration of art, history and landscape in all that it does, the Museum has spent the last decade redefining itself as a central part of community life with an award-winning exhibition gallery for its collections and a thorough reinterpretation of its landmark Florence Griswold House as a boardinghouse for artists, c. 1910. Visit FlorenceGriswoldMuseum.org for more information, including history, events and hours of operation.